Worthington Faulkner (5 May 1901–23 July 1967), businessman, was born in Spotsylvania County and was the son of Mary Elizabeth Rosser Faulkner and Robert Lee Faulkner, a coal-chute foreman for the Southern Railway Company. The family had moved to Amherst County by 1910. Faulkner left Lynchburg High School in 1920 without graduating. At least partly based on his athletic prowess, he matriculated that same year at the Virginia Military Institute, where he played three sports and during his senior year started as quarterback on a 9–1 football team. Faulkner served as his class's president all four years and as president of the Honor Court his final year. He received a B.S. in civil engineering in 1924 and also the Society of the Cincinnati Medal for service and character.
Wert Faulkner, as he was generally known both personally and professionally, spent the following year and a half as an assistant coach with VMI's freshman football and basketball squads. During the next decade he worked for Richmond Hosiery Mills and then in East Tennessee for the O. B. Andrews Company, which constructed containers. On 2 May 1929 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Faulkner married Mary Ann Brown, a former debutante. The following year they lived in Atlanta, in then-unusual circumstances in which Mary Faulkner, a department store clerk, earned nearly twice her husband's salary as a salesman. After Faulkner's company transferred him to California in 1932, his wife returned to Knoxville and petitioned both for divorce on the grounds of desertion and for sole custody of their son, which she received on 27 October 1932. They remarried in Roane County, Tennessee, on 29 June 1935.
In 1934 Faulkner returned to the Lexington area and rejoined VMI's football coaching staff. That same year Pennsylvania-based James Lees & Sons Co. established the Blueridge Company, Inc., to open a carpet mill in Glasgow, in Rockbridge County. The enterprise brought new life to a declining community that had been suffering the effects of the Great Depression. James Lees & Sons engaged Faulkner on 13 December 1934 as the first employee of the new company. As personnel manager Faulkner, with his knowledge of local residents, hired many of the initial workers the next year. By March 1935 construction was under way on the plant, and the first rug shipment rolled out of the facility that September. Faulkner became recognized for his warm, engaged management style and willingness to help employees when needed.
During World War II, the weaving mill converted most of its operations to manufacturing canvas duck for the armed forces. In the postwar economic expansion, the Glasgow plant grew rapidly and added the manufacture and dying of yarn to its carpet-weaving. James Lees & Sons promoted Faulkner to become the facility's general manager on 1 May 1945. Two years later the parent company completed a $3.5 million expansion of its Virginia plant, complete with air conditioning.
As a result of his reputation in statewide business and civic circles, Faulkner became second vice president of the Virginia Manufacturers Association in 1948, and that organization elected him its president in October 1950 for a one-year term. He chaired the Committee on Industrial Development for the Virginia State Chamber of Commerce beginning in 1948, and the next year he presided over the Virginia Industrial Exposition at the Atlantic Rural Exposition Grounds. When the Virginia State Chamber of Commerce elected Faulkner its president in 1952, he became the first business leader to have presided over both the chamber and the Virginia Manufacturers Association. Aligned with the prevailing business climate of Virginia, he lauded the chamber's drive to lower unemployment taxes during his one-year term, and in January 1953 he led a campaign that supported tax cuts.
Faulkner helped advise VMI on reforms of its rat line during the 1949–1950 academic year. In 1950 he became a member of the board of visitors until health problems forced him to resign three years later. He served as vice president of the alumni association but declined its presidency. His charisma and his fundraising abilities led the VMI Sportsmen's Club to proclaim a Wert Faulkner Day on 9 April 1960.
Heart disease forced Faulkner to retire from James Lees & Sons (beginning in 1967 Lees Carpets, part of Burlington Industries, Inc.) on 1 January 1957, but he remained with the company as a consultant and in 1960 appeared at the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Glasgow plant, which by then employed 2,400 people who wove about a million pounds of yarn into carpets each week. Remaining a charismatic figure in business circles and a supporter of the state's conservative business establishment, Faulkner returned to the Chamber of Commerce's board of directors in 1960 and remained a sought-after recruiting speaker. He also served on a series of government boards and committees, including the Board of Conservation and Economic Development and the Virginia Advisory Legislative Council's special committees on higher education and on water resources. Worthington Faulkner died of a heart attack at a Lynchburg hospital on 23 July 1967. Two days later the factory closed for his funeral, and about 1,500 people attended the graveside services in Glasgow Cemetery for "the man who put Glasgow on the map." The following year the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors named a section of State Route 130 between Natural Bridge and Glasgow the Worthington Faulkner Memorial Highway (later shortened to Wert Faulkner Highway), and VMI honored him in 1972 as an inaugural member of its sports hall of fame.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in James M. Morgan Jr., The Jackson-Hope and the Society of the Cincinnati Medals of the Virginia Military Institute: Biographical Sketches of All Recipients, 1877–1977 (1979), 125–126; Worthington Faulkner alumnus file (including self-reported birth date on Matriculation Form and memorial, 25 July 1967), Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Va.; Marriage Bond and License, no. 515 (1929), Knox Co., Tenn.; Mary Brown Faulkner v. Worthington Faulkner (1932), Petition and Final Decree of Divorce no. 2763 in the Court of Domestic Relations, Fourth Circuit Court, Knoxville, Knox Co., Tenn.; Marriage Bond and Record, no. 133 (1935), Roane Co., Tenn.; Office of the Executive Director, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce Records, Accession 28252, Library of Virginia; Knoxville News-Sentinel, 2, 3, 5 May 1929; Danville Bee, 5 Jan. 1953; Lexington Gazette 18, 25 May 1960; Commonwealth 17 (Dec. 1950): 45–46; ibid. 19 (May 1952): 30; ibid. 27 (May 1960): 29, 45; ibid. (July 1960): 19, 20–21, 29; obituaries and editorial tributes in Lynchburg Daily Advance, 24 July 1967 (quotation), Lexington News-Gazette, 26 July 1967, Buena Vista News, 27 July 1967, Commonwealth 34 (Aug. 1967): 4, and Virginia Military Institute Alumni Review 44 (fall 1967): 26 (portrait).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Matthew S. Gottlieb.
How to cite this page:
Matthew S. Gottlieb,"Worthington Faulkner (1901–1967)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Faulkner_Worthington, accessed [today's date]).
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